I’ve written in the past about iButtons and my attempts to waterproof them. Although iButton temperature dataloggers are fairly well sealed, they are not waterproof. But if you know an old person that used iButtons in the late 90s or early 2000s, they might claim that iButtons are absolutely waterproof.

It turns out that iButtons are one of those rare things in life that really were better when you were a kid. In the old days they could be put out in the ocean for weeks or months, completely bare, and most of them would survive just fine … Continue Reading

This is another one of those tricks that I forget how to do unless I write it down. When I move Powerpoint (2010) presentations from my Windows machine to my Mac (Powerpoint 2011), the equations usually get destroyed along the way. The workaround is to turn the equations into images that can’t be altered by the Mac.

For example, here I’ve got an equation plopped into a blank presentation, with the equation editor toolbar.

The equation.

The first step is to copy the entire equation and the text box … Continue Reading

Here’s a mostly useless visualization of the collection of journal articles that sits in my reference database in Endnote. I deal mostly in marine biology, physiology, biomechanics, and climate change papers, with a few molecular/genetics papers thrown in here and there. The database has 3325 entries, 2 of which have ambiguous publication years and aren’t represented above. This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the literature in my field, it’s just an exhaustive survey of the literature on my computer.

To make this figure, I first had Endnote export the database to … Continue Reading

Experienced cold water scuba divers will tell you that a dry suit is a vital piece of safety equipment, especially in challenging conditions (seriously, they’ll tell you without prompting, and then babble on about their gear until you walk away). Serious divers will also tell you that maintaining your gear in tip-top shape is an important safety issue, and all service should be done by trained technicians (again, it’s like that old joke: How do you know someone is vegan/went to Princeton/is from California? Answer: They’ll tell you. Divers, particularly overweight men with walrus mustaches, are the same way when … Continue Reading

As outlined in an earlier post, I found that certain old micro SD cards were performing spectacularly poorly when it came to power consumption because they failed to go into a low-power sleep state immediately after writing data to the card. I recently purchased a few new SanDisk micro SD cards in various capacities to see how they behaved. I purchased 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB SanDisk cards from Amazon in November 2014. These were all tagged as “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com” and ranged from $5.99 to $12.99.

The Open Wave Height Logger is meant to be a submersible pressure logger that will record absolute pressure at 4Hz for several months to give a record of wave height, and ideally do this on a single set of 3 D-cell batteries. I have recently made a few changes to the OWHL software, and discovered a major flaw in my original battery test. As a result, I have begun a new round of battery tests. The hardware and software changes are described here, and new battery test results are shown at the bottom of the page.

Last year I published a little paper showing how whelks (Nucella lapillus) drill through mussel shells at different rates depending on water temperature. This involved making hundreds of hours of recordings of whelks slowly scraping their way through the calcium carbonate shell of Mytilus edulis mussels in different water temperatures. The video above includes two examples of those recordings from two different snails of the same size, highlighted as red dots on the graph in the video, one taken at a water temperature of 9°C (48°F) and the second at 17.5°C (63.5°F). What you’ll notice … Continue Reading